Do you know why every social media channel has started giving more preference to short videos of few seconds. It was Tiktok which first played with human psychology and now Youtube, Instagram, FaceBook are following the trend. The reason behind huge success of these short videos is the decreasing attention span of humans. This indicates that we are becoming more and more impatient. We want everything to be superfast, whether its internet, cars, order delivery or investment growth. So, if you are running a website which is not fulfilling these parameters, then its time to re-evaluate your very reason of existing on the world wide web. Speed up your website or else stop expecting anything from it.
Your conversion rates are likely to be the same if your website speed is abysmal. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, nearly 40% of visitors will leave. What exactly does this imply? This means that a slow website will turn off visitors. This effectively negates the entire point of having a website. Make a speed check to ensure you don’t lose 40% of your audience due to a lack of focus on speed.
If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, nearly 40% of visitors will leave.
Conversion rates are likely to be low if your website is slow. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, nearly 40% of visitors will leave. What exactly does this imply? This means that a slow website will turn off visitors. This effectively negates the entire point of having a website. Make a speed check to ensure you don’t lose 40% of your audience due to a lack of focus on speed.
So, this is a real example where we did some research ton increase the speed of our own website. We will make you go through this process step by step. In order to achieve good rating on GTMetrix we tested a lot of stuff and made lots of tweaks.
Check your current Website Speed
We used both GTMetrix and Google Page Speed insights for monotoring the current loading speed of our website. The overall rating alloted was “C” which is not good for sure.
Check Different parameters
GTMetric provides you very detailed reports. In fact, a logged in user can grab a video of their website loading process to understand the experience met by a new visitors. It will bifurcate everything to the smallest details to make it easier for you to find the root cause behind the sluggish behaviour of your website.
Strange Thing
Now the strange thing was that this all happened when we were using a premium plugin like WP rocket on our website.
So, we deactivated the plugin and tested again.
Now, the rating dropped to “D” which was naturally worse.
The EWWW Image Optimizer
The reason behind deactivating the other plugin was to test this new tool called as “EWWW Image optimizer“. We bought lifetime version for unlimited sites through a Appsumo. And, this deal was much better than WP rocket, where we had many limitations.
Why EWWW Image Optimizer and not WPRocket?
Even after buying the WPRocket infinite plan (costing $249), they provide support for just one year. Plus, they dont provide your the CDN hosting space for free. Other Benefits associated with the most popular unlimited plan ($99) are:
- Unlimited images
- Unlimited sites
- Site speed audits
- Auto-compress
- Auto-WebP
- Lazy load
- Auto-scale
- JS/CSS optimization
- SWIS performance
- Custom domain
- Global CDN delivery
- 800 GB monthly traffic bandwidth
Setting up the Plugin
The overall process to integrate the plugin is quite easy. You just need to follow the guided instructions. First you need to install the plugin in your WordPress Library.
Once you are in the plugin dashboard, enter your website’s URL that with to integrate.
Next, you need to create an API key and insert it into the Compress API section. This will activate the Easy IO feature also.
There is an option to dive into the expert mode where you will get a lot more options to customise the overall process of speeding up your website.
This is another recommended plugin which will work in unison with the main plugin.
The best feature was to bulk optimize all the images at once. You will not believe that we had more than 9000 versions of the existing images and this functionality optimized them all without much effort. The process was little slow and but it was worth for the final results.
For a speedier site, use the SWIS Performance plugin with caching and other speed-boosting tweaks.
The Results
So, finally when we checked our speed, we achieved “A” rating on GTMetrix. Not only this, the rating on Google Page speed insights insights by whopping 20%.
In order to achieve these results, people usually spend hundreds of dollars on freelancers (Fiverr and Upwork). And, this tool has made this whole process much easier for you.
Final Verdict
We want to to be transparent here. These results are not only because of this plugin. We also used a faster web hosting, deactivated a lot of plugins and kept only the essential ones, used Google Tag manager to manage all the tags at one place etc. So, if you are looking to speed up your website, then you must surely try out this awesome tool.
Vijay Sood is a seasoned digital marketer with a passion for driving online growth and innovation. With a robust background in developing and executing comprehensive digital strategies, Vijay excels in leveraging SEO, content marketing, and social media to boost brand visibility and engagement. His expertise lies in transforming data-driven insights into actionable marketing campaigns, helping businesses achieve their digital objectives.